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One response to “54 years in space and so far we’ve only got two minibus-sized probes to leave the solar system”

1. 2012/06/16

   Dave Walker

   Hmm…

   Pioneer 10 and 11 are also well on their way, of course – and taking a bit of a poke around the Web, I wonder what happened to the Mariner probes, post Martian flybys?

   You’re right, though, that’s still only a handful of little boxes of mostly 1970s technology “outward bound”, and only two (three?) of them still having anything to say.

   We’re just taking our first squint over the fence around our back yard, but we’re not too sure on our feet yet, either – it’s taken Voyager 1 34 of those 54 years to get to the back fence, even with the help of a series of gravitational slingshots that only lines up once every 200-odd years.

   I’m not sure what we’ll get, first – patience to work on missions spanning multiple generations (and the power plants to run the probes for that long), or “the next big thing after Goddard”, propulsion-wise.

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